The Telegraph Subscribe to The Telegraph on YouTube ► https://bit.ly/3idrdLH On the Russian ministry of defence’s television channel, Zvezda, a serving army officer explained to a talk show audience how Russian soldiers were dying in Ukraine. “Our guys over there, from Donetsk and Luhansk, and our special operation forces are dying and our country,” he said. “No, no, no,” interrupted the presenter who gets up from his desk gesticulating and marches across the studio shouting: “Stop!” “Our youth are still dying,” the soldier continued. By this time, the presenter had come up to him and shouted: “Can you stop now? I will tell you what our guys are doing there. Our guys are smashing the fascist snakes. It’s a triumph of the Russian army. It’s a Russian renaissance.” Read more here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-new… Get the latest headlines: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Telegraph.co.uk and YouTube.com/TelegraphTV are websites of The Telegraph, the UK’s best-selling quality daily newspaper providing news and analysis on UK and world events, business, sport, lifestyle and culture.

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, PhD, is Dean of Integral Education at the California Institute for Human Science. He founded the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. He has also authored or edited eight books including: Integral Ecology (co-authored with Michael E. Zimmerman), Metatheory for the Twenty-first Century (co-edited with Roy Bhaskar et al), and Dancing with Sophia (co-edited with Michael Schwartz). In 2018 he founded The Institute of Exo Studies which draws on over 50 disciplines to help make sense of anomalous and extraordinary experiences of our multiverse. His website is https://whatsupwithufos.com/. You can download his paper, Our Wild Kosmos! at https://whatsupwithufos.com/wp-conten…. Here he explains that non-human intelligence can be thought of as natural to the earth (faeries and elementals), from outer space (i.e., ETs), or from celestial realms (angels and devas). His “integral” approach involves taking into consideration the huge spectrum of possibilities as evidenced in the academic, esoteric, and UFOlogical literature. He maintains that no single approach is sufficient to capture the complexity of the phenomena. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of a doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” awarded by the University of California, Berkeley, 1980. He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition on the best evidence for postmortem human survival. (Recorded on March 15, 2022)

We have another Ukraine Emergency Translation Group meeting scheduled for this Friday, April 1 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time, noon Mountain time, 1pm Central time, 2pm Eastern time, 8pm Greece, 9pm Turkey.  

We will share your Translation with the group, if you like.  You can email your Translation to me at zonta1111@aol.com.

Or perhaps you have a sense testimony you’d like to share.  Or other insights or comments you may have.

Open to all Translators.

See you Friday.

Mike Zonta
Ukraine Emergency Translation Group

Prosperos Meetings is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Ukraine Emergency Translation GroupTime: April 1, 2022 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Listen To Your Mother Jul 9, 2014 Debi shares the story of her daughter, who transitioned from male to female when she was four years old. She challenges the ignorant comments she hears about having a transgender child. LTYM: Kansas City ● 5/3/14 ● Unity Temple on the Plaza http://listentoyourmothershow.com/kan…

by Astro Butterfly (astrobutterfly.com)

I’m a personal development workshop and retreat junkie. 

A few years ago I attended a Psychodrama workshop focused on healing and embracing the shadow. At some point, we got split into groups of 2, and our task was to insult our partner in as many ways as possible, until they got ‘triggered’.

Since this was psychodrama work, we would of course ‘act’ the insults by playing a role – it was not that we were purposefully being nasty. This was just a guided exercise to trigger our blind spots and wounds so we could understand and ultimately heal them.

My partner started insulting me. At first I didn’t get triggered. But then he said something that really hurt me. I knew he was acting, I knew he didn’t mean it, but still, I got hurt. 

No matter how much personal development work we’ve done, we all have ‘triggers’. We all have wounds. We live with our wounds for years and decades UNTIL we face and embrace them.

This process is not easy – the 1st impulse is to shut down and run away from the pain. But if we stay with the wound long enough – if we really stay with it, if we really try to understand it – incredible opportunities for growth await us. 

You may wonder why the psychodrama workshop was purposefully designed to trigger our wounds. Why open nasty cans of worms? Why hurt people on purpose?

The workshop leader understood something that many people in the healing world understand: the gift is in the wound. Our wound will continue to remind us – through painful experiences – that it’s our life’s purpose to pay attention to it and figure it out.  

Chiron – The Wounded Healer

In astrology, Chiron rules the process of triggering and healing the wound. Chiron stirs feelings of abandonment, rejection, shame, inadequacy, feeling odd, unfit and irrelevant.

What distinguishes Chiron from other difficult planetary archetypes is the acute feeling of woundedness. When we have a Chiron transit, we feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong with us.

What makes things even worse is that while we’re painfully aware that something is not quite right, we also feel guilty for having these feelings, for feeling so vulnerable. 

A keyword for Chiron is ‘acute’. Our Chiron wound can be triggered all of the sudden and we’re pretty much powerless – we feel overwhelmed by pain and act from our deepest, earliest emotional conditionings. 

Chiron In Aries – The Identity Wound

More than in any other Chiron sign, Chiron in Aries questions our very existence: Why are we here? Do we matter? Is our existence relevant?

Since 2018, when Chiron entered Aries, we’ve witnessed an avalanche of selfies, photo filters, and look-at-me, influencer-types of posts on social media. While there’s nothing wrong with these tools and approaches, there’s something about the obsession and overuse that screams “overcompensation”. 

Overcompensation is an excessive reaction to a feeling of inferiority, guilt, or inadequacy leading to an exaggerated attempt to overcome the feeling. Aries is the 1st sign of the zodiac, the sign of “I am”.

Chiron in Aries triggers our wound of identity. Why are we here? Until we find out, we’ll do our best to show the world (and ourselves) that our existence matters. Our Instagram likes are ‘social proof’ that feeds our need for validation. 

New Moon In Aries – The Oscar Slap

The New Moon in Aries on April 1st, 2022 is tightly conjunct Chiron. The goal of this New Moon is to point to what it is that triggers us – to what it is that makes us feel hurt, wounded and rejected.

Of course, the reason we are so sensitive and so easily triggered by our wound is that there is something very important about it. Our wound points to our potential, to the person we could become if we figure it out. 

At the Oscars, the host Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinket Smith. Her husband Will Smith, seeing she was upset, went on stage and slapped Chris Rock.

Whether the event was real or staged is not important for our astrological analysis. The event happened so it influences our collective consciousness. 

What was going on astrologically at the time of the event? A Moon-Mars conjunction and some other tense transits lead to energy build-up.

But what stands out is the applying Sun-Chiron conjunction in Aries. At the ceremony, Mercury was exactly conjunct Will Smith’s natal Chiron. Something that Chris Rock said (Mercury) triggered Will Smith’s Chiron wound. 

There are many psychological interpretations of why Will Smith got triggered and had such an intense reaction. 

Some event analysts focused on Will Smith’s relationship with Chris Rock, others on his relationship with his wife. Some say that Will Smith felt emasculated. According to some, slapping Chris Rock may have been a knee-jerk reaction to show the world (and himself) ‘who’s the boss’, to (re)establish some alpha hierarchy. 

Ruled by Mars, Aries is a masculine/Yang energy that describes how we express our Yang energy. Chiron in Aries shows us where we may be wounded in the expression of our yang, initiating energy. 

Born in the Venus-ruled sign Libra, Will may have embraced the nice, harmonious and peace-seeking Libra qualities, at the expense of his Chiron in Aries. Trying to be the ‘nice guy’ for too long, he may have neglected his inner Mars, his inner warrior.

Ultimately, the triggered wound points to who Will is now vs. who Will could be. Is he the best Aries version of himself? Has he lived a life where he has been true to his Aries nature, taken action with boldness, and assert himself with integrity? 

When we neglect our Chiron, we’re at the mercy of our wound, which erupts every time it’s stirred. Our Chiron wound won’t let us live until we pay attention to it.

New Moon In Aries – Listen To Your Wound

The New Moon in Aries conjunct Chiron and Mercury is our opportunity to sit with our wound and understand it, once and for all. 

How will this Chiron-flavored New Moon in Aries play out?

Some of us might get into arguments. Chiron conjunct Mercury = words that hurt.

Some of us might learn about something hurtful, others may be reminded of some wounding event from the past. Some of us may become aware of thinking patterns that have been in default mode, sabotaging us in unconscious ways. 

When these wounded thoughts and feelings arise, stay with them longer than you normally do. Let go of your attachment to the pain and try to listen from a deeper place. 

These are a few questions to ask yourself at the New Moon in Aries: 

• Why do I feel so hurt? 
• When have I reacted similarly in the past?
• Can I see any common patterns?
• What am I overcompensating for? 
• What is really going on?
• … and perhaps the most important question, what does my wound reveal about my purpose and the person I could become? 

Franz Kafka believed illness was at the root of his writing yet he embraced wellness fads with hearty vigourIllustration by Martin O’Neill/Cut-it-out

Will Rees is a writer and editor, and publisher at Peninsula Press. His writing has been published in The Guardian, Granta and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, and his debut book Hypochondria is forthcoming from Coach House. He lives in London.

Edited by Sally Davies

29 March 2022 (aeon.co)

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Afew months before he died, Franz Kafka wrote one of his finest and saddest tales. In ‘The Burrow’, a solitary, mole-like creature has dedicated its life to building an elaborate underground home in order to protect itself from outsiders. ‘I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful,’ the protagonist notes at the outset. Quickly, however, the creature’s confidence begins to wane: how can it know if its defences are working? How can it be certain?

Kafka’s protagonist wants nothing less than complete security, so nothing can be left out of its calculations. In the small world of its burrow, every detail is significant, a possible ‘sign’ of a looming attack. Eventually, the creature begins to hear a noise it believes to be that of an invader. The noise is equally loud wherever it happens to be standing. It would appear, then, to originate within the creature’s own body: the sound, perhaps, of its own heart beating, its own frantic breathing; life happening and ebbing away, while the creature is worrying about something else.

‘The Burrow’ seems to serve as a retrospective commentary upon Kafka’s own life. By the time he was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of 34, Kafka had already spent two decades worrying about disease. He took his holidays at convalescent spas, while letters to friends and lovers often amounted to little more than catalogues of symptoms. Kafka attributed all this to what he frequently called his ‘hypochondria’, a condition that, he believed, consigned him to the monastic life of a writer.

Kafka had inherited the view, popular since the Romantic era, that a certain sickliness becomes a writer – an idea that can be traced back as far as Robert Burton, who explained in his compendious (and never-completed) Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that ‘windy Hypochondriacal Melancholy’ was an ailment of students and scholars. ‘I am taciturn, unsociable, morose, selfish, a hypochondriac, and actually in poor health,’ Kafka wrote in 1913 to Carl Bauer, the father of his fiancée, Felice. What is more, he added, ‘I deplore none of this.’

On the morning that he wrote these words to Herr Bauer, Kafka had been reading the letters of Søren Kierkegaard. He was seeking inspiration for the persona he was cultivating for himself, a holy, invalid litterateur. Hypochondria was inevitable, Kafka explained, for a person whose ‘whole being is directed toward literature’. It was a bombastic claim for a young civil servant employed at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague – one who, at that time, had published only one book: a slim volume of stories that failed to sell more than a few hundred copies. To Felice, he was bolder still: ‘I am made of literature, I am nothing else.’

But Kafka’s hypochondria had a more surprising dimension: his parallel investment in ideologies of physical fitness and wellbeing, with many similarities to the modern cult of ‘wellness’. Throughout his life, Kafka maintained a commitment to the principles of Lebensreform, a cultural movement that was popular among the German-speaking bourgeoisie. Along with an embrace of the virtues of purity and nature, Lebensreformists promoted vegetarianism, abstention from alcohol and tobacco, naturopathic medicines, simple dress, and exposure to sunlight and fresh air. For a person who took these views as seriously as Kafka, Lebensreform informed every aspect of a person’s life: no detail could be spared one’s attention.

On the night of 22 September 1912, Kafka enjoyed what he considered to be his first literary success. In a single sitting, one week after his father Hermann’s 60th birthday celebrations, he composed ‘The Judgment’, a masterpiece of paternal ambivalence. In the dissociative, happy hours that followed, he noted in his diary that writing requires a ‘complete opening out of the body and the soul’. Kafka’s scrupulous attention to his body can offer us insight into his subsequent practice as a writer, the distinctive way he transformed his suffering into literature. For Kafka, hypochondria was not just a state of mind, but a fundamental disposition towards the world, a way of subjecting one’s life and relationships to endless dissection and interpretation.

Ever since he was a boy, Kafka had harboured insecurities about his body. Back then, trips to the swimming baths could be ruined by the sight of his father Hermann’s imposing physique. Kafka’s self-image was confirmed when, as a young man, he was spared military service ‘on account of weakness’.

‘I am the thinnest person I know,’ he told Felice a few years later. That was saying something, he added, for he was ‘no stranger to sanatoria’. In a moment of optimism, Kafka once bought Strength and How to Obtain It (1897) by Eugen Sandow, the founder of modern bodybuilding. Sandow was a source of encouragement to skinny and dumpy males across the continent, with a readership that included Fernando Pessoa, W B Yeats and T S Eliot.

Throughout his life, Kafka was seduced by a variety of different teachers and ideologies of wellbeing. At times, he subsisted off only nuts and berries. He chewed each mouthful of food for several minutes, according to the instructions of one Horace Fletcher. On advice from several disreputable authorities, Kafka went about the cold Prague winter in shirtsleeves, hoping to acquire natural immunity to disease, and he refused to heat his bedroom.

But it was the holistic regime of the Danish fitness guru Jørgen Peter Müller that truly resonated with Kafka. Müller is poorly remembered now, but in the early part of the 20th century he was a global celebrity. His bestselling book was My System: 15 Minutes’ Work a Day for Health’s Sake (1904), a copy of which Kafka kept open at his bedside. My own copy is a reissue from the 1930s, by which time Müller could boast of having sold 1.5 million books, in 26 languages, while having gained the patronage of the Prince of Wales. By 1912, Müller was able to relocate to London, where he opened a high-class fitness institute, first near Piccadilly and then in Trafalgar Square (the building is now home to a Waterstones bookshop).

Most important of all were cleanliness and purity: windows were kept open to disperse ‘pestilential vapours’

Müller was an unlikely role model for Kafka. A pioneer of the modern publicity stunt, he once had a volunteer pull a wheelbarrow full of rocks across his stomach in front of a large crowd. In photographs, he is frequently depicted skiing in his underwear or else submerged in frozen lakes. Müller’s ‘system’ comprised a series of exercises that were mostly aimed at strengthening the abdominal muscles, as well as advice covering virtually every aspect of physical health. Kafka began ‘Müllerising’ (as it was called) sometime around 1910, and followed it for the best part of a decade.

Müller disdained those who believed that ‘sickly looks are an infallible index of an aesthetic and soulful nature’. In fact, Müller directly addressed himself to ‘Literary and Scientific Men and Artists’, urging those who occupy the ‘higher spheres’ not to neglect their physical bodies. In seeming contradiction with the deliberate cultivation of a neurasthenic persona, Kafka also internalised Müller’s message. ‘My mode of life is devised solely for … fitting in better with my writing,’ he told Felice early on in their relationship, as he explained the rationale behind his Müllerising: ‘time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.’

According to Müller, physical strength was only one aspect of a more complex concept of health. His book advised Kafka on matters such as diet, sleep, dress, temperature control, as well as the proper care of one’s teeth, mouth, throat, hair and feet. Most important of all were cleanliness and purity: windows were to be kept open to disperse ‘pestilential vapours’, and the prescribed ‘15 Minutes’ Work’ included several minutes of bathing and scrubbing (‘skin gymnastics’). According to Müller, the skin was the body’s most important ‘organ’, the threshold between outside and in, and failure to immediately remove the poisonous excretions that accrue there was tantamount to suicide. For Müller, health was not a one-off choice: it was an ongoing task that required constant attention to every aspect of one’s body and environment.

Inspired by Müller, Kafka’s daily routine consisted of waking up and arriving at his office by 8am, before returning home to eat a late lunch and take a nap. He would then do 10 minutes of exercises – ‘naked, by an open window’, as prescribed by Müller – before taking an evening constitutional and eating dinner. Around 10pm, he’d begin his real day’s work: sitting down to write until the early hours of the morning. ‘Then again exercises, as above, but of course avoiding all exertions, a wash, and then, usually with a slight pain in my heart and twitching stomach muscles, to bed.’

If Kafka’s testimony is to be believed, this daily rhythm was essential to his remarkable productivity in this period. In the space of a few weeks at the end of 1912, he wrote the short story ‘The Judgment’, several chapters of the novel Amerika, and then, between November and December, ‘The Metamorphosis’ – among other things, a remarkable story of bodily transformation. The idea for it came to Kafka while he was lying in bed during a period of intense insomnia. He had, he said, ‘an overwhelming desire to pour myself into it’.

His health was ‘deceptive’, Kafka once complained; ‘it deceives even me’

At the beginning of ‘The Metamorphosis’, the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa fails to show up for work. He is understandably preoccupied, having been transformed overnight into an insect. Nevertheless, Gregor fears the arrival of the chief clerk and the insurance doctor, who he knows will accuse him of malingering. According to Gregor’s employers, the sick are ‘workshy’ and ‘simply have to overcome’ their imaginary ailments ‘because of business considerations’.

Similarly, Müller believed that ‘illness is generally one’s own fault’, and wrote about the exorbitant cost to employers and to society of workers who, having paid no heed to their own wellbeing, are taken to spells of absence due to self-inflicted illnesses. The sick were guilty of ‘fraud’.

Kafka knew how pernicious that worldview could be, having witnessed the suffering of workers at the hands of unscrupulous bosses in his role as an insurance official. Nonetheless, the idea that responsibility could yield freedom appealed to him: if physical illness was a choice, then one could simply say ‘no’. His health was ‘deceptive’, Kafka once complained; ‘it deceives even me.’ Müller’s book promised nothing less than a metamorphosis: if Kafka followed its principles, his body would be ‘transformed from a fidgety, hypochondriacal master, to an efficient and obedient servant.’

Kafka’s obsessive dedication to physical wellbeing seemed to go hand in hand with a solitary disposition. But in the summer of 1912, he met Felice at the apartment of their mutual friend Max Brod, the man would go on to become his literary executor.

Felice was an ambitious young secretary who lived in Berlin. A distant relative of the Brods, she was visiting the family en route to her sister in Budapest. Five weeks after their initial encounter, Kafka wrote to her, beginning a long and often frantic exchange of letters. ‘Every one of your letters, no matter how short, is for me endless,’ he wrote to her. ‘I read it down to the signature, then start again, and so it goes around and around in circles.’

Kafka proposed, in writing, the following summer. It was a strange letter, for the most part a litany of reasons why Felice ought to reject him. In place of the ‘incalculable losses’ she would suffer at his side, she stood only to gain a ‘sick, weak, unsociable, taciturn, gloomy, stiff, almost hopeless man.’ Nevertheless, Felice accepted.

He offered to buy Felice a screen so that they could exercise together in the prescribed way

For Kafka, this initiated a period of crisis. He truly did wish to marry Felice. The problem was that he also wished not to marry her, and that these two options were incompatible. For as long as these desires were private, their incommensurability could be contained. Now, ambivalence spilled over into panic. The same relentless attention he brought to his bodily wellbeing became a neverending self-interrogation about his engagement. ‘Everything immediately gives me pause,’ he wrote – every little thing setting off a chain of doubts that went around in circles.

Taking to his diary, he wrote a ‘Summary of all the arguments for and against my marriage,’ weighing his ‘inability to endure life alone’ against his suspicion that the happiness of a shared life would come ‘at the expense of my writing’.

From the earliest days of their courtship, Kafka’s anxieties frequently extended beyond his own body to that of Felice. He would constantly ask about her headaches and chastise her for not taking them seriously enough, as well as for her ‘nerve-wracking’ lifestyle. Kafka implored Felice to begin Müllerising, offering to buy her a screen so that they could exercise together in the prescribed way; days before he sought to break off their engagement, he wrote to tell her about the vegetarian household they would be keeping. By enlisting her into his regimes, Kafka was inviting Felice to enter his little burrow where he hoped that, living together but entirely on his own terms, he would be able to enjoy all the benefits of solitude and companionship.

In June 1914, Kafka and Felice were officially engaged. It was a whole-family affair: the Kafkas and the Bauers together in Berlin. Kafka’s mood that day was funereal. ‘Was tied hand and foot like a criminal,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Had they sat me down in a corner bound in real chains, … it could not have been worse. And that was my engagement; everybody made an effort to bring me to life, and when they couldn’t, to put up with me as I was.’

The final straw came when he and Felice went shopping for furniture: Kafka was appalled by the fussy, middle-class tastes of his fiancée, which conflicted with the minimalist principles of Lebensreform. ‘The sideboard in particular … oppressed me,’ he recalled two years later; it was like a ‘tombstone’. In fact, hadn’t he heard a threatening noise as they walked into the furniture shop, the toll of a funeral bell?

Kafka was uncompromising: like everything else, furnishing a home was a matter of principle. Nothing ought to be surplus to requirements; his watchword, as ever, was purity. Sideboards, photographs, bedlinen, aspidistras and rugs – to Kafka, all this amounted not simply to clutter, but ‘dirt’.

Kafka’s ‘hypochondria’ was something far more than a fear of illness

A fortnight after these festivities, Kafka wrote a letter to Felice’s friend Grete Bloch, attempting to explain his strange behaviour and ‘obstinacy’. ‘I have to refer everything to my lack of health,’ he explained. ‘If I were healthier and stronger, all difficulties would have been overcome.’ In that case, he would be ‘sure’ of his relationship with Felice; indeed, he would be ‘sure of the whole world’. As it stood, however, he was certain of only one thing: ‘Undoubtedly,’ he suffered from ‘an enormous hypochondria, which however has struck so many and such deep roots within me that I stand or fall with it.’

As this statement makes clear, Kafka’s ‘hypochondria’ was something far more than a fear of illness. It was the way his entire world was made meaningful, every detail significant. Nothing could be taken for granted; everything had to be weighed, viewed from every angle. Big or small, everything was material for the interpretations of a consciousness that was both expansive and pedantic.

Soon after he’d written to Grete, Kafka was summoned back to Berlin. It seems that Felice and Grete had spoken. Felice decided to put an end to things and, alongside her sister and Grete, Felice confronted Kafka in a suite at the Askanische Hof Hotel. Kafka experienced this as a painful humiliation, a blow from which it was difficult to recover. In his diary he would characterise the encounter as a ‘tribunal’.

Back in Prague, Kafka moved into the apartment that had been abandoned by his sister and her husband. The First World War had erupted in Europe the day before. For the very first time in his life, he was living alone. He had achieved ‘complete solitude’, save for a noise: the endless chatter of his neighbours. In his diary, Kafka wrote: ‘In one month I was to have been married. The saying hurts: you’ve made your bed, now lie in it.’

As it happened, over the coming months, Kafka would spend more time at his desk than in bed. In this cold and solitary apartment, burrowed away from a world that was falling apart, he continued the long work of retrospection. Sitting at his desk until five, six, seven o’clock in the morning, he began work on a novel that would become The Trial (though, like ‘The Burrow’, it remained incomplete, and was edited and published by Brod only after Kafka’s death in 1924).

The Trial is the story of a man, Josef K., who is accused of an unnamed crime. He is ruthlessly persecuted and eventually executed by an unknown authority, while being kept in ignorance of his guilt. What he finds unbearable, above all, is this enforced ignorance, and hence the senselessness of the accusation against him: what is K. supposed to have done?

His real hope is that he will find the crime that could make sense of the punishment

It is all too much to bear; as a result, K. turns to writing. Late in the novel, he decides he will produce a written document examining ‘every tiny action and event from the whole of his life, looking at them from all sides and checking and reconsidering them.’ K. knows this will be a long process, ‘an almost endless amount of work’. And so if, ‘as was very likely, he could find no time to do it in the office he would have to do it at home at night.’ In fact, one did not have to be ‘of an anxious disposition’ to view this task with a certain resignation, to suspect that ‘it was impossible to ever finish it.’ Nevertheless, with all this in mind, he begins the endless work of self-examination.

For K., exoneration is not the point. His real hope is that he will find the crime that could make sense of the punishment, and, in making it meaningful, make it bearable. He never reaches this state of enlightenment, however. Kafka’s heroes never do. At the end of the novel, he dies senselessly, ‘like a dog’.

Kafka paused the writing of The Trial to produce a short story on a similar theme, ‘In the Penal Colony’. Here, so-called ‘criminals’ are selected for execution at random, and die by being placed into a machine in which their crimes are etched, repeatedly, into their skin. The officer overseeing this procedure believes that a condemned man ‘deciphers’ his guilt ‘with his wounds’, and therefore dies in a terrible but delectable state of enlightenment. However, putting himself into the machine, the officer does not achieve this meaningful death; only ‘murder, pure and simple’.

After a period of estrangement from Felice, Kafka eventually resumed the relationship at a low simmer. The two became engaged again. Then, in 1917, Kafka had his first attack of tuberculosis. It was an awful scene: one evening he went to bed, only to wake in the middle of the night choking on his own blood. He stumbled to the basin, and then to the window, from where it was possible to see the castle up on the hill. But the blood continued to flow.

The sun was rising when Kafka finally returned to bed – not unusual for him. Less expected was the fact that he had no trouble falling asleep. Later, the maid appeared and, seeing the mess, offered an unsolicited prognosis: ‘Herr Doktor, you won’t last much longer.’ But for the first time in months, Kafka was calm. He had slept better than ever. Shortly afterwards, he finished things with Felice, putting an end to five years of indecision. But before long he would be engaged once more, having now enlisted a tubercular patient named Julie Wohryzek into his neverending efforts to understand what he wanted.

For those who have been labelled ‘hypochondriac’, the moment of actual diagnosis tends to be an exoneration, the occasion that proves that one was never a hypochondriac to begin with (‘I told you I was sick’). For some people, a diagnosis – however terrible – can thus come as something of a relief, since it heralds the end of the hypochondriac’s endless cycle of interpretation. When Alice James (sister of the philosopher William and the author Henry) was diagnosed with breast cancer, she responded by calling it ‘the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact, when living seems life.’

It was the lesson he had learned from Müller: illness is one’s own fault

But this was not the reason for Kafka’s calm. His pulmonary haemorrhage had initiated a metamorphosis in him, from le malade imaginare into a bona fide patient. Yet, even now, he continued to refer to himself as a hypochondriac. He explained that years of imaginary ailments had intensified by ‘innumerable gradations’ until ‘it finally ended with a real illness.’ This ‘disease of the lung’, he said, was ‘nothing but an overflowing of my mental disease.’

Some years earlier, Kafka had told Felice that people who got headaches must avoid seeking pain relief. Instead, you had to study your entire life ‘so as to understand where the origins of your headaches are hidden.’ It was the lesson he had learned from Müller: illness is one’s own fault. As he lay in a sanatorium atop the Tatra Mountains, Kafka looked back over his whole life to find the hidden origins of his tuberculosis. The punishment was clear enough. It only remained to find the crime.

Kafka had several theories about the source of his illness, but his favourite was that his tuberculosis had been caused by half a decade of uncertainty about committing to Felice: ‘“Things can’t go on this way,” said the brain, and after five years the lungs said they were ready to help.’ Kafka’s imaginary ailments and his real ailments existed on a single interpretative plane: both were symbolic manifestations of his spiritual condition, and therefore could be subjected to interpretation. Perhaps this is what he meant when he declared: ‘I am made of literature.’ For Kafka, illness was always a metaphor; even as he lay dying, the hypochondriac work of reading body and soul remained forever incomplete.

To read more on wellbeing and creativity, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.

Stories and literatureThinkers and theoriesIllness and disease

Jason Hine reminds us:

“Every part of your body is adorable and incredible, an actual love body. A thousand tiny deities the size of molecules are worshipping and protecting each tiny particle of your body.

“There is a religion in another world that worships your stomach, your lungs, the curve of your thigh or your pectoral muscles as sacraments of a god or goddess.

“Your lovebody is a luxuriant forest at sunset in which light coruscates through dewdrops and deliciously awakens a thousand joyful wild creatures.”

—Jason Hine

(Contributed by Rob Brezsny)

A letter from the ballet legend on the war

By Mikhail Baryshnikov • March 29, 2022 (SFExaminer.com)

By Mikhail Baryshnikov

It’s been almost 50 years since I lived in Russia, and I’ve spent those years living in a free society, but I grew up in Latvia as the son of a Russian military officer in what was then the USSR. My family was part of an occupying population, but even occupied Latvia was more open, and more European, than Russia at that time. So, I am a product of Europe, of Russia and, of course, of America. For what they are worth, my thoughts are filtered through this specific lens.

From the start of the invasion of Ukraine by the armies of Vladimir Putin, I’ve felt deep dread and a certainty that this will be a bloody and horrific conflict. I understood immediately that this move of the Russian army was more threatening than the so-called annexation of Crimea and the separatist insurgency in the Donbas region.

Ukrainians have always been, and still are, friends, neighbors and family. The relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples has been one of easy fluidity between languages, between cultures and between borders. The two countries are incredibly interwoven, but with an awareness and appreciation of subtle cultural differences.

I can’t begin to understand why people would trust and follow a leader like Putin, but Russians historically have struggled under oppressive and brutal leadership. How they end up with such leaders I can’t answer. There are dozens of books to be written on this subject, but let’s remember that even in the free and democratic society in which I live, a shocking percentage of Americans appear to believe outlandish theories related to a “stolen” 2020 election. What this tells me is that ignorance of history and nationalistic fervor are not exclusive to any one country.

I refuse to paint all Russians with the same brush and I think Putin appeals to those who are fearful. I suppose he makes them feel safe in the same way all authoritarian leaders make their people feel protected. It’s a false sense of security because, of course, any day, the protected can easily become the persecuted.

I can’t affect politics or throw Molotov cocktails, and I am not competent to give any thoughts or advice on the matter of what kind of help the U.S., NATO or the Europeans could or should provide to the Ukrainians, but the least I can do is help as many refugees as possible. That’s why I am honored to have been invited by the great writer Boris Akunin and economist Sergei Guriev to join them in launching truerussia.org. I don’t know if True Russia’s humanitarian plea will be seen by citizens of Russia, but the beauty of cyberspace is that it might. They need to know what is being done in their name.

Again, I wouldn’t be worth much as a fighter, but when the Ukrainians are victorious, I would be honored to go and thank them for fighting. In fact, they aren’t fighting just for themselves, but for all of us who believe in free and open societies.

This letter was first printed in the French newspaper Le Figaro. It is reprinted here with the permission of Le Figaro and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

In a letter published in the French newspaper Le Figaro, ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov announced a new fundraising organization to help refugees of the Ukrainian war. (Courtesy of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Le Figaro)

The Five of Disks

The Lord of Worry is most aptly titled, for when this card comes up in a reading, there looks to be financial, material or domestic trouble on the horizon. Something poses a threat to your overall security. This might be an unexpected expense, or job worries, or maybe even a disturbance in your family life.

There will always be something to worry about, when the Five of Disks comes up. But there’s one important thing to bear in mind – whatever is causing the problem is much more of a threat than it is a reality. Worrying about it might just make it worse than it needs to be!

When the Lord of Worry is about, anxiety is the emotion of the moment. We look to the future and we see something nasty ahead. Then we sit and worry about it. Try to remember – what you put your attention on grows. So if you worry about your overdraft, it will get bigger! That’s not, of course, to say you should not do all you are able to DO, in an awkward situation – just that once you have, there’s no point in worrying about it.

Sometimes we go through a stage in our lives where we feel as though, whatever good comes to us, it is bound to be undermined and darkened by negativity and sadness, that we cannot help but be disappointed. Yet just by holding that view, we invite negativity in, to add to the real problems we already had.

It isn’t easy to try to be accepting and positive and trusting when life is giving us a hard time – but accept we must, if we don’t want to make things worse!

So – the Five of Disks indicates a possible threat to our security. It is important not to feed that possibility with our own fear. Fear is a powerful emotion. It can rule if we let it. When this card comes up, remember that disturbance is possible – not probable. Do all you can to avert it.

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)

GUEST ESSAY

March 29, 2022 (NYTimes.com)

By Roxane Gay

Dr. Gay, a contributing Opinion writer, is the editor of “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde” and the author of the memoir “Hunger,” among others. Her book “How to Be Heard” is forthcoming.Leer en español

This is not a defense of Will Smith, who does not need me to defend him.

Instead, this is a defense of thin skin. It is a defense of boundaries and being human and enforcing one’s limits. It is a repudiation of the incessant valorizing of taking a joke, having a sense of humor. It is a rejection of the expectation that we laugh off everything people want to say and do to us.

I think a lot about how we are constantly asked to make our skin ever thicker. Toughen yourself, we’re told, whoever we are, whatever we’ve been through or are going through. Stop being so brittle and sensitive. Lighten up.

I’m not talking about constructive criticism or accountability but, rather, the intense scrutiny and unnecessary commentary people have to deal with when they challenge others’ expectations one way or another.

Who is served by all this thick skin? Those who want to behave with impunity. If the targets of derision only had thicker skin, their aggressors could say or do as they please. If we all had the thickest of skins, no one would have to take responsibility for cruelties, big or small. It’s an alluring idea to some, I suppose.

Thick skin comes up often in the context of comedy. Done well, comedy can offer witty, biting observations about human frailties. It can force us to look in the mirror and get honest with ourselves, to laugh and move forward. Done less well, it leaves its targets feeling raw, exposed and wounded — not mortally, but wounded.

It should go without saying that comedians are free to say what they please. Long live creative license and free speech. But it should be obvious that the targets of jokes and insults have every right to react and respond. There is a strange idea that there is nobility in tolerating or, better yet, enjoying humor that attacks who you are, what you do or how you look — that with free speech comes the obligation to turn the other cheek, rise above, laugh it all off. We often see this when comedians want to joke about race, sexual assault, gender violence or other issues that people experiencing them don’t find terribly funny. If you can’t laugh along, you are humorless. You’re thin-skinned. You’re a problem.

I’ve stopped aspiring to be thicker-skinned, and I no longer expect or admire it in others. Because sometimes, people can’t take a joke. In some situations, yes, we’re humorless. If our skin gets too thick, we won’t feel anything at all, which is the most unreasonable of expectations. And we won’t know we’ve been wronged or wounded until it’s too late.

During the 2022 Oscars telecast, the comedian Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s closely shorn hair. “Jada, I love you,” he said. “‘G.I. Jane 2,’ can’t wait to see it.” The audience, including Ms. Pinkett Smith’s husband, Will Smith, laughed, but she rolled her eyes, and her face fell. Her thick skin cracked.

You probably know what happened moments later: Mr. Smith walked onto the Oscar stage, slapped Mr. Rock, returned to his seat and shouted that Mr. Rock should keep her name out of his mouth, including an obscenity for good measure. The laughs became titters, became stunned silence. It wasn’t clear if this was a bit or real life, and then all was crystal clear: What we were experiencing was someone not taking the joke. We were seeing skin that had thinned to nothing.

Ms. Pinkett Smith has alopecia, a condition resulting in hair loss that disproportionately affects Black women. It was in poor taste for Mr. Rock to poke fun at her hair. He has reportedly said he did not know about her alopecia, but he probably at least knew that the joke would sting, since he produced the documentary “Good Hair,” about Black women and their often fraught relationships with their hair.

Ms. Pinkett Smith has spoken openly about her struggles with hair loss — which is difficult for anyone but especially hard in the sexist and image-conscious world of American celebrity, where women, especially, endure an endless litany of comments about their appearance, their sartorial choices, their relationships and anything else people can find to pick apart. Famous women such as Whitney Houston, Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes, Janet Jackson, Monica Lewinsky and Meghan Markle have been pushed to the edge by such scrutiny and the unreasonable expectation that they thicken their skin to derision, disrespect, insults and jokes. Even if later, long after these public shamings, their treatment is re-examined and condemned, the measly acts of public contrition are too little, too late. The damage is done.

Violence is always wrong and solves very little. Mr. Smith could have made so many better choices that did not involve putting his hands on another person in front of the entire world. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opened an inquiry into the incident Monday afternoon, and Mr. Smith apologized to Mr. Rock and the world on Monday evening via Instagram.

Still, Mr. Smith most likely saw his wife’s pain, and it’s possible he was himself experiencing a moment of fragility, of thin skin. In his memoir, “Will,” the actor writes about the guilt he felt because, as a child, he could not protect his mother from his father’s abuse. Mr. Rock’s gibe was not in any way the same thing as domestic violence, but I can see how Mr. Smith might not have been able to take that joke, at his wife’s expense, given the layers of context and public and private histories leading into that evening.

I am trying to hold space for all of those layers — Ms. Pinkett Smith’s exhaustion with being a target of humor, Mr. Smith’s series of bad decisions and Mr. Rock’s trying to maintain his composure in the immediate aftermath of being a target of violence. Unfortunately, the incident has become something of a Rorschach test onto which people project their backgrounds, opinions and affinities. And what gets lost in the discourse is that, however disappointing the incident was, it was also a rare moment when a Black woman was publicly defended.

We also witnessed an example, last week, of a woman forced to wear incredibly thick skin as she was left largely undefended. During Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, that distinguished jurist endured all manner of insult, racism and misogyny from Republican senators asking ludicrous questions that were really opportunities for grandstanding. Judge Jackson was applauded in many circles for her calm and composure.

For many Black women, it was a painful spectacle because we know what it is like to experience that kind of scrutiny, interrogation and disrespect in personal and professional settings. We know what it’s like to withstand scrutiny without intervention. We understood that the only way forward for Judge Jackson was to remain composed, stoic, impervious. We also noted that other than Senator Cory Booker, Democrats failed to protect their president’s nominee. The Senate Judiciary Committee apparently valued decorum over Judge Jackson’s dignity.

Thick skin was also on display at the 2022 Critics Choice Awards, when the director Jane Campion made the bizarre claim that the tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams “do not play against the guys, like I have to.” Whatever led to that strange, unnecessary and incorrect claim (Ms. Campion clearly had not planned her remarks, and she was caught up in the adrenaline of the moment), it forced the sisters to be thick-skinned, to take the joke made at their expense. As cameras panned over to them, the Williams sisters smiled quizzically and maintained their composure. In the aftermath — Ms. Campion apologized the next day — they were gracious beyond measure. Their thick skin held up, as it has in the face of myriad unspeakable insults and as it will many times to come. It shouldn’t be this way.

Yes, these are all public figures. An imperviousness to criticism and ridicule is a necessity for celebrities or anyone in the public eye. But no matter how thick your skin is or with how much wealth, fame and power you are cosseted, being the butt of a joke isn’t fun. Sometimes, it is intolerable. When you are constantly a target — of jokes, insults, incivility and worse — as most Black women are, the skin we’ve spent a lifetime thickening can come apart. We’re only human, and so, too, are the people who love us.

• © 2022 The New York Times Company

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)